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Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

> Most 2600 games were crap, and consumers knew it and stopped buying terrible games.

Right. The biggest reasons for the crash were the lack of try-before-you-buy and the lack of good-quality reviews.

(Eh... ever note how "good review" means a review that paints the product in a good light, as opposed to a review which is, itself, high-quality? Ditto "bad review", mutatis mutandis? Maybe this influences why nobody reviews reviews.)

The industry practice of paying for good reviews (either buying them outright or stopping payment of "free" games and such if unfavorable reviews get published) is classic quarterly report thinking: It works in the short term, at least arguably, but it damages the industry overall and sets it up for... another crash.

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> Right. The biggest reasons for the crash were the lack of try-before-you-buy and the lack of good-quality reviews.

This wouldn't have mattered if there weren't so many crap games. Nintendo addressed this by strictly limiting the number of releases, as well as having a thorough pre-release review process. Atari couldn't do that, since there was no way to police it, and anyway they wanted to shovel out crap themselves.

> Nintendo addressed this by strictly limiting the number of releases, as well as having a thorough pre-release review process. Atari couldn't do that, since there was no way to police it, and anyway they wanted to shovel out crap themselves.

This is only true of Nintendo outside of Japan, and pretends that both Nintendo and Atari had some aversion to shipping crap games. Atari being able to limit third parties wouldn't have stopped ET, and Nintendo of America still published their own sweet of terrible games.

Since the crash mostly affected the US (see all the Europeans wondering what the crash was), that Nintendo reviewed games only for the US/Europe is appropriate.

Also I'm not sure you read my whole comment -- anyway they wanted to shovel out crap themselves, refers to Atari shipping lots of crap games.

I don't think Nintendo released that many crap games to the US, and they also didn't realease too many, 17 at launch in 1985, 10 in 1986, 9 in 1987, and then fewer per year after that. Atari released 22 games in 1982, in addition to the flood of third party titles that were released that year.

You’ve never watched the Angry Videogame Nerd[0], have you?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbQ-gSLYQEc6IWgKJNOMU...

>Since the crash mostly affected the US (see all the Europeans wondering what the crash was), that Nintendo reviewed games only for the US/Europe is appropriate.

So your explanation of how Nintendo fixed this problem was only important in half of their market, and Europe wasn't even facing the problem that they fixed.

Nintendo may have put out crap games, but there were a LOT of crap games that Atari themselves put out that were way worse. We're talking about a company that actually thought making first-party video game version of a Rubik's cube was a good idea.

Games for the Nintendo Gameboy through to the last of DS line were a minefield of shovelware. There were a large number of really great games but they were still a drop in an ocean of crap. The jury is still out on the Switch.

> … and Nintendo of America still published their own sweet of terrible games.

Did you mean to write “suite”? (Or did Nintendo get into the candy business?)

In retrospect, that idea was like introducing taxi medallions to make prices for taxis go up when almost everyone can drive a car: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_New_York_City#1930...

Of course, it only got worse from there in the case of game consoles. The fun thing is that the current debt-based economy encourages this kinds of behavior.

Which also reminds me of the home computers section of the article. The recently launched Intel NUC with discrete GPU, while probably underpowered, is a step in the right direction: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/intels-10nm-cannon-l...

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